You have recently engaged in a winter holiday. How might an event over this time period spark your writing? Draw on the recent vacation or a past vacation to respond to one of the following prompts: make a family winter holiday – Hanukkah, Christmas, ski trip – your focus. Record the details of the traditional meal […]

There is a place that holds special meaning to you. Landscape and buildings convey strong associations, too: cultural, religious, traditional or avant-garde. A tall white tower can connote power and protection. A smooth lake usually means tranquillity or reflection. Colour and image offer rich symbolic and cultural stimulants for writers. Colours have connotations – black […]

Tessa Hadley’s top 10 short stories Nadine Gordimer says short stories should ‘burn a hole into the page’. Here are 10 of the most incandescent examples of the form from Tessa Hadley, whose story, ‘Bad Dreams’, is one of the 2014 BBC National Short Story finalists. ‘Hadley’s unerring eye for what is true – in everyday […]